Is my hard drive dead?

[papso]

Hi there!

I've been at this for quite some time, so here's the full story. Last week I had some free time, so I decided to take apart my computer to apply thermal paste, as I assumed that ~4 years of stock paste could be improved upon. I've done it to other computers in the past, so I felt confident in my job, but alas, I must have messed something up. Every now and then when I started it after the application, Automatic Recovery would launch. From that menu, everything resulted in an error except for CMD. Sometimes CMD's DiskPart would display C: as existing, and sometimes not. I assumed that this was due to a loose cable from when I applied thermal paste, so I opened it back up to check it out. Nothing seems out of place, so I decided to look online for fixes regarding the inability to boot. In this, following some tutorials, I ended up following a tutorial for using Macrium Reflect to make a rescue flash drive to boot off of, which would supposedly delete and recreate the BCD (Boot Configuration Data), which I was unable to do successfully in CMD. After this going smoothly, I'm now approached by a SMART Hard Disk Error, where it has detected an "immenent failure". I did a quick test, system diagnostics gave me this 24 digit error code:

 PLVPP9-7L99B9-MFPWLJ-609103

I haven't seen it anywhere online before. I don't have any reasonable means of backing up my hard drive at the moment, otherwise I would select Continue Startup to see what happens.

[Paul_Tikkanen]

Hi:

The code you received, Hard Disk 1 SMART Hard Drive Detects Imminent Failure, means the hard drive is about to die, or has died.

What you can do is try to reinstall W10 and don't delete or format any partitions on the drive.

Let W10 install over the current Windows installation, and it will create a Windows.old folder.

After W10 installs, you can explore the Window.old folder, find your old user name/profile and copy any of the files you want to keep to a portable hard drive.

Then you can replace the HDD and reinstall W10.

To reinstall W10...Use the Media Creation Tool.  Make the 64 bit installation media.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10

You can make a W10 USB flash drive installer using an 8 GB flash drive using another Windows PC, since your PC is not working.

If you are asked to enter a product key during the installation process, select the 'I don't have a product key' option, and W10 will install and automatically activate once you are connected to the internet.

Here are the steps to create the W10 USB flash drive installer...

1. Select Download tool now, and select Run.
2. If you agree to the license terms, select Accept.
3. On the What do you want to do? page, select Create installation media for another PC, and then select Next.

4. Select the language, edition, and architecture (64-bit or 32-bit) for Windows 10. You want 64 bit.

5. Select which media you want to use:
6. USB flash drive.  Plug in a blank USB flash drive with at least 8GB of space. Any content on the flash drive will be deleted.

Then you can install the drivers and available software from your notebook's support page.